© Copyright 2021 Jonathan A. Bowdler
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© Copyright 2021 Jonathan A. Bowdler The Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Movement Jonathan A. Bowdler A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2021 Reading Committee: John Findlay, Chair Margaret O’Mara Bruce Hevly Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History University of Washington Abstract The Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Movement Jonathan A. Bowdler Chair of the Supervisory Committee: John Findlay History The countercultural back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the third wave of an antimodern tradition that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. This study places the hippie back-to-the-land movement within this larger context and follows the intergenerational exchange between the counterculture and second generation back-to-the- landers such as Ralph Borsodi, Mildred Loomis, and the School of Living organization in the mid-1960s. The resulting narrative offers a complex picture of exchange as an older generation introduced hippies in Berkeley to decentralism, eugenics, and a form of anti-statist environmentalism. The counterculture, however, was the product of the Cold War prosperity and the shifting politics of the New Left. The overwhelmingly white, middle-class counterculture did not adopt eugenics. Instead, it formulated a novel back-to-the-land ideology that combined decentralism and pastoralism with an emerging white identity politics that appropriated from non-white traditions, especially those of Native American groups, that were viewed as premodern models for a post-modern future. This study follows three case studies – Twin Oaks in Virginia, Alpha Farm in Oregon, and Heathcote in Maryland – to track the movement as the 1960s counterculture transformed into the New Age movement of the 1970s and 1980s. By drawing on newsletters and other archival materials, this study explores how back-to-the-landers sought to fashion alternative political cultures that avoided the practice of voting, novel economic systems that empowered women, and intercommunal organizations that offered labor- sharing services and New Age social gatherings. Like other antimodern movements such as the Arts and Crafts movement, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s primarily served the racial and class interests of participants and ended up reinforcing dominant cultural trends such as the rise of post-World War Two consumerism, the shift towards a politics of the personal, the rightward turn of American politics in the 1970s, and the settler-colonial appropriation of Native culture. Though the countercultural back-to-the-land movement offered individual personal transformation and influenced the Organic movement, the environmental movement, and the personal computing movement, it failed to attract a more diverse coalition and could not offer a radical alternative to Cold War society and culture. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. The Back-to-the-Land Tradition in the Twentieth Century: From Progressive Reform to Hippie Protest ........................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2. The Reemergence of the Back-to-to-Land Movement: Intergenerational Exchange From 1966 to 1977 ..................................................................................................................... 108 Chapter 3. “Without Any of the Divisive Influence of Voting:” The Third Generation’s Quest for a Politics of Harmony ................................................................................................................. 174 Chapter 4. The “Economics of Equality:” Hip Capitalism at Twin Oaks and Alpha Farm in the 1970s ........................................................................................................................................... 232 Chapter 5. “Onwards and Inwards!:” The Counterculture’s Transformation into the New Age Movement in the Southwest, Southeast, and Pacific Northwest ................................................ 232 Epilogue ...................................................................................................................................... 331 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 331 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This years-long project would not have been possible without the guidance of my academic mentors. I am deeply indebted and thankful to my dissertation-chair Dr. John Findlay. Thank you for your patience, openness, and wit. I would also like to thank Dr. William Rorabaugh, who died before he could see this final manuscript. Your deep knowledge and storytelling ability are greatly missed. This manuscript has also been greatly improved based on the feedback and guidance of Drs. Margaret O’Mara and Bruce Hevly both of whom helped me understand how the countercultural back-to-the-land movement fit within more prominent historiographic traditions. Graduate advisors are not the only academics who have shaped this project. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Johann Neem, my undergraduate advisor at Western Washington University, who introduced me to the Beats and early American republicanism. Finally, this project would have been far less rich without the help and guidance of librarians and archivists. I will be forever grateful to the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Communal Studies’ head archivist Ms. Jennifer Green. Your deep knowledge and love for 1960s and 1970s history made long days poring over underground newspapers a joy. I can also finally answer your question about which Grateful Dead songs are my favorite: “Saint Stephen” and “Sugar Magnolia.” My academic mentors provided much-needed guidance, yet I could not have written this manuscript without my family's support and encouragement. I completed two dissertation chapters before the COVID epidemic struck and could not have finished this project without the child-care help of my mother Josephine Ensign, my stepfather Peter Kahn, and my mother-in- ii law Mollie Albrecht. I am eternally grateful, and Hazel has been so lucky to grow up with you all. I am also truly indebted to my larger family, particularly Steve and Ladeen Miller, who graciously welcomed us into their home at the height of the pandemic. Thank you both, and I look forward to exploring Summerwood with Hazel for years to come. This project would also not have been impossible without the openness of my back-to-the-land family: Aunt Jacque, Uncle Fred, and Aunt Mary, as well as my cousins Nathan, Ryan, and Rachel. I was so lucky to grow up with you all. Finally, I want to thank my incredible wife, Lily. You have been my greatest cheerleader, teammate, and editor. The words and ideas on these pages would not exist without you. iii DEDICATION To Lily, Hazel, and our family. iv INTRODUCTION Swaying together singing “We Shall Overcome” was no longer enough. The tanks lumbering through my neighborhood, clanking down my street brought home the futility of confrontational tactics. We needed a new plan, one that was plausible and released us from the politics of mutual hate. If we couldn’t change the world, we would change ourselves and build communities….In Vermont, New Mexico, Virginia, and Oregon – any place where land was available and people sparse – students dropped out, looking for a more peaceful revolution. The back-to-the-land movement showed us a way we could love ourselves, each other, and the dirt that fed us. After graduation [in 1970], my new husband and I, along with ten of our friends, headed west like generations before us. Our covered wagon was a Chevy van. We abandoned indoor plumbing, electricity, supermarkets, and the benefits of our graduate Ivy League degrees for one- hundred-and-sixty acres in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest, seeking the sweetness of childhood without sacrificing adult perks. 1 – Margaret Grundstein, Naked in the Woods, 2015 By 1970, Margaret Grundstein, like countless other liberal young adults, had concluded that they could not achieve radical social change through collective urban protest. Who could trust in the democratic system when tanks drove down streets, the government sent young men thousands of miles to kill Vietnamese and Cambodians, the Ohio National Guard killed students at Kent State, and reactionaries assassinated beloved movement leaders? If the options available to radicals included the cultural protest of placing daisies in gun barrels or following in the Weather Underground's militant footsteps, many, drawing on a rich American pastoral tradition, instead fled to the countryside. Once there, they assumed, they could get down to the vital work of individual transformation by peeling back the layers of socialization that they believed were 1 For some works I use Kindle editions that do not lend themselves to page numbers – a necessity during the COVID pandemic. Margaret Grundstein, Naked in the Woods: My Unexpected Years in a Hippie Commune, Kindle Edition (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015), Location 195. 1 ultimately responsible for the conformity, hypocrisy, and inequality in 1960s America. They thought